Listing Collections & Forbidden Assumptions

[Daniel Jalkut <jalkut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

First a brief intro: I'm Daniel Jalkut and just became responsible  
for the Mac weblog editing software, MarsEdit. In my new role I've  
had a crash course in publishing protocols, but am probably still a  
bit naive. Be gentle :)

I've just read through the APP draft for March 2007 and in general  
I'm really happy with what I'm learning about APP. Just one thing  
stood out as a point of concern.

From Section 10. Listing Collections:

> Clients MUST NOT assume that an Atom Entry returned in the Feed is a
> full representation of a Member Entry Resource and SHOULD perform a  
> GET
> on the URI of the Member Entry before editing.

The behavior of MarsEdit, which I think is typical of many remote  
editors, is to maintain a working "mirror" of the last N posts on the  
server. These are full representations of the post, an assumption  
that is probably inspired by the fact that "getRecentPosts" returns  
the full content of items.

So what concerns me with APP is that clients will necessarily "double- 
fetch" all post data in order to comply with the standard. The  
problem is exacerbated by the fact that MarsEdit and other editors  
show a "complete preview" of items that the user may wish to edit, so  
the full representation may be desired even before an actual edit of  
an item is imminent. Again this luxury is probably inspired by the  
verboseness of the "getRecentPosts" method.

So to emulate the "complete sync" that I currently get with  
MetaWeblog and Blogger, I'll have to:

1. Download the complete collection feed.
2. Iterate and download the complete member resource for each item in  
the collection.

It seems that the situation would be helped by having some way to  
either download a light-weight index of the collection feed's items  
(I hope I didn't miss something obvious here), or else to have a clue  
from the server that in fact the feed's items are full representations.

Given my interpretation of the draft requirement, I think one of two  
things will happen. Either clients will ignore the standard and  
assume full representation feeds, or else clients will habitually  
double-strain the server in order to maintain a reliably full  
representation copy of the content.

I did search the archives for an existing topic on this subject, but  
didn't find anything. Hopefully I didn't miss it.

Thanks for your attention,
Daniel